I recently got the new Tears in the Fence (issue 51) in the post; and Upstairs at Duroc issue 11. They're two of the best international little magazines of our time, and form a sort of London-Paris Nexus. The firstly mentioned mag has some great reviews and articles, by Ian Brinton, Jennifer K Dick and Tom Chivers. John Goodby's new Dylan Thomas-inspired work uncaged sea (Book and CD) is reviewed, and boy do I want a copy - it sounds brilliant. Duroc features a few poems of mine, and work by, among others, Rufo Quintavalle, Peter Hughes, Adam Fieled, and Laura Mullen. Subscribe to both.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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